What cell phone plan should I get? (Probably none.)

I am slooooowly getting used to having two phones. It’s a first for me.

At my old job my work phone and personal iPhone were one and the same, with the same number. Work and play overlapped a lot more.

Currently I have a super cheap personal phone that’s only good for calls and painful texting, and a work smartphone. It’s an Android, which I despise, and doesn’t have a great battery life.

The $1200 question is: shell out for a smartphone of my own, or just keep a basic dumb phone and have the work smartphone?

It would very definitely be a want rather than a need. I don’t need Instagram, after all.

If I were to get a nice phone for myself, it’d probably just be an iPhone 4s like my last one (based on price, mainly, although the fact that I can charge older style iPhones on my radio clock dock is a bonus. We also already have an awesome iPhone 4 sized case).

I’ve been looking at what the best deals for iPhone 4s plans are in NZ. Here are my choices (my hastily Photoshopped in numbers to the right represent what I would have to pay for the phone itself upfront; the blue numbers on the left are the monthly plan cost).

To get a free phone I would have to pay $69 a month which just seems too steep somehow for a regular outlay, even though all the plans actually equal out cost-wise over the full 2 years.

For now I’m going to live with the status quo and see how I cope.

Would you rather pay more upfront and less monthly, or more monthly and less upfront?

The upfront price when I switched to Republic Wireless really did deter me for a while, but when I did the math and realized I’d be saving at least $800 per year by switching, that was enough to convince me. Laying out all that money at first is difficult, but I am enjoyed seeing a decrease in the cell phone category of my budget.

I think I tend to pay more upfront and less monthly with a phone. I pay around $200-$300 for the phone itself (if it’s a new model) and then $90 a month for service (unlimited text/talk/data). Most phone companies around here are now letting you pay less upfront and just basically pay monthly for the phone, but it always winds up costing more in the long run. (Service is the same price, but you just don’t have so much out of pocket to begin with.) My mom wants to do this, but she would wind up paying over $600 for the phone over a two-year period, versus paying $300 right now.

Hmm, I used to have two phones as well, one personal and one for work. I hated keeping track of two phones and thus made my personal iPhone my primary phone and kept the crap work blackberry on the side. If I had a real choice, I would’ve used my work phone as a personal phone too, but I was worried about confidentiality and the company spying on my personal data (not that I’m that important but yea). However, as I couldn’t bring myself to make work my priority, I got a nice phone for myself which I brought around everywhere, relegating my work phone to the bottom of my bag, if that.

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